Françoise Lionnet

Françoise Lionnet

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (French)Professor of African and African American Studies

A past-President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard. In Fall 2015, she also holds the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Newhouse Humanities Center, Wellesley College. She is on leave from UCLA where she is a Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies. Until July 2015, she served as Director of the UCLA African Studies Center. She is a Research Associate of the Center for Indian Studies in Africa at the Univ. of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, SA. Her research focuses primarily on Indian Ocean literary, cultural, and historical studies, in relation to Atlantic and Caribbean Studies. She is interested in the longue durée of colonialism in those regions, and focuses on 18th to 21st century writers.

Professor Lionnet has held fellowships and grants from the Cornell Society for the Humanitie the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the SSRC, the United Nations Fund (UNFPA), the UCHRI, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California-Irvine, the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the NEH. She directed the NEH/Northwestern Summer Institute in French Cultural Studies in 1995

In June 2003, she held a residency fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Italy